Wake County, NC - Bicentennial File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Barbara Kawamoto Reprinted with permission of the News & Observer and cannot be reproduced without permission. The New Capitol - ‘A Noble Monument’ The News and Observer December 29, 1991 Raleigh 200/The New Capital By John Sanders July 1985 The new Capitol built in the 1830s must have been one of the last major buildings erected in the United States entirely by muscle power, human and animal. No steam engines were available to aid in cutting and hoisting the heavy building stones, for example. This helps to account for the fact that the Capitol payroll at its peak carried 300 men, then the largest construction work force in the state’s history. Laborers and quarry hands were hired locally. Stonemasons and carpenters, many of them natives of the British Isles, generally were hired in the North. Some of them remained in Raleigh after the Capitol was completed and today are proudly numbered among the ancestors of Raleigh residents. Nothing in local building experience compared with the Capitol project, so it is understandable that cost estimates were consistently far too low. It is unlikely that many thought the initial 1833 legislative appropriation of $50,000 would meet the whole cost. But no one - neither building commissioners, nor architects, nor legislators - had any idea that the cost of the Capitol and its furnishings would mount, by the time of its completion in 1840, to nearly $533,000. The general revenue of the state was then about $150,000 a year. To get a comparative idea of the scale of financial commitment that represented and the political reaction to its cost, imagine that the General Assembly today decided to spend $30 billion on a single building, chiefly for its own accommodation. Fortunately for the state, however, the building commissioners, inspired by their ambition to raise a monument to self-government and an object of pride for all the people of the state, went first-class from the start and reckoned the cost afterward. By the time the true scale of expense became apparent, the character and size of the building were fixed and no retreat was possible. One effect of this major financial commitment, coupled with the quality and solidity of the structure that resulted, was to discourage all efforts to alter or replace the Capitol for decades. And by the time the state could afford to build a new Capitol, the 1840 building had become sufficiently invested with pride and sentiment that all thoughts were for its preservation and improvement, not its replacement. It was not inconceivable, after the fire of 1831 that destroyed the first State House that a replacement would never be built. The disaster had revived Fayetteville’s hopes for displacing Wake as the site of the Capitol. After a year’s debate, the General Assembly in 1832-33 voted funds to build a new Capitol on the old site. The legislature also determined that the structure would follow the cross-shaped plan that William Nichols had given the State House in his alterations a dozen years earlier. Five legislators were named commissioners responsible for the design and construction of the new Capitol. Rejecting plans by other designers, the commissioners engaged, once again, William Nichols (then in Alabama) and his son, William Nichols, Jr., to design an improved version of the remodeled State House. By mid-1833, the commissioners and the younger Nichols had agreed upon the main features of the plan: A cross-shaped, three story building of stone with a central domed rotunda, executive offices on the first floor, and legislative chambers and offices on the second floor. The neoclassical style was adopted without question. In August 1833, for reasons not apparent on the record, the Nicholses were superseded as the Capitol’s architects by Itheil Town and Alexander Davis of New York, one of the nation’s principal and earliest architectural firms. Although construction was well begun, Town and Davis made significant modifications. For example, they substituted fully developed porticoes fronting the east and west wings for the pseudo-porticoes with engaged columns that Nichols had preferred. They also gave the building a more decidedly Greek character than Nichols had contemplated. The Capitol had been under construction for a year and a half when the commissioners were in need of a masonry superintendent. Through Itheil Town, they hired David Paton (1801-82), an architect born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Paton reached Raleigh in September 1834. He was immediately made clerk of the works, or general manager, of the project, responsible to the commissioners and to Town, who continued as the architect. Within a few months, however, Paton gained the commissioners’ full confidence and supplanted Town as the architect. Paton was responsible for several significant changes in the interior that made it more functional than it otherwise would have been. He is also due much credit for the quality of all of the interior and much of the exterior construction and finish. Soon after the completion of the Capitol, a legislative committee observed: "(I)n the Capitol just erected, the State possesses a building which for solidity and beauty of material, uniform faithfulness of execution, and for Architectural design, is not surpassed, if indeed equaled, by any building in the Union. . . . And to North Carolinians it will remain for Centuries, an object of just and becoming pride, as a noble monument for the taste and liberality of the present generation." Confirmation of that early judgment is found in the observation of the noted architectural historian Wayne Andrews, made a century and a third later, that North Carolina possesses "the most distinguished of all our state capitols." ============================================================== USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. The electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. 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